Gang Violence in Brighton's Underworld

In Brighton Rock, trouble ensues after the murder of a journalist. Spicer, a gangster, jeopardises the gang’s safety by making a fatal mistake: somebody saw him planting false evidence. Pinkie, the murderer, tries to curb the problem, but falls into despair. 

He marries the witness, a waitress named Rose, to prevent her from ever giving evidence. Then he kills Spicer to make him pay for his mistake, playing his death off as an ‘accident’. Ida Arnold, a friend of the murdered journalist, is on Pinkie’s trail. Control slips through his fingers. And he is only seventeen.

Brighton Rock is a character study of a young and very troubled individual. The Boy, known in his entourage as ‘Pinkie’, is ruthless, but also naïve. He is a force of evil: an undiagnosed psychopath. 

In rare moments, he realises his weaknesses, but his quest for power overwhelms him. The narrator admits at one point that Pinkie ‘was scared, walking alone back towards the territory he had left – oh years ago’. To marry Rose, he needs to confront her parents who live near his childhood home. ‘It was no good rebelling any more; he had to marry her.’ (pp 140-41). Soon, he re-enacts his tough-guy persona, responding to Rose’s warning of her parent’s obstinacy: ‘I’ll settle them . . . Where are they?’ Constantly, Pinkie masks his inner struggles, trying his best to maintain his role as gang leader.

Pinkie’s tragedy is his hatred for life. He never finds peace and abhors everything virtuous. By the novel’s ending, the sum of his life is nothing – ‘zero’. His destructive outlook relapses onto himself. 

Source:

Brighton Rock. By Graham Greene. Penguin: London, 1970 [1938]. Pp 248. £4.99. 0-14-027428-6.

Brighton Rock. Edition by Vintage Books.